Machine Shop: Hype Machine Team Blog

The second Hype Machine t-shirt sold out in under 3 days – thanks, guys! They’re at our printer’s shop now, and should be ready to ship in about 2 weeks. I’ll send out an e-mail to let you know when they’re on their way. Hey, maybe Anthony will even help me pack them this time…

UPDATE 8/12 8:00AM ET: The shirts are now sold out.

We’ve got shirts again! Exactly 129 of them, lovingly designed by Zoya and printed on fine American Apparel stock.

Here’s how they look:

If you aren’t sure about the right time to order, you can always see how many are left right on the Hype Machine homepage, and decide then.

Get one!

By the way, Zoya is also available for graphics/print jobs. She loves making t-shirts, but she’ll design a mean 3-color disc for your band, too.

That’s the question asked by Alex Bec and Will Hudson in their project that invites artists to respond and create.  They produce the artist submissions in lovely prints and quality books, there are now two issues.

A great question to ask yourself.  You may find that you can actually do many of the things you want, if you strip away excuses that make you see them as impossible.

So, If you could do anything tomorrow – What would it be?

During the past few weeks I’ve been playing with the URGE – MTV’s subscription all-you-can-eat music service. Good value for the money.

High-quality editorial content in the service is refreshing, as MTV spent some time creating, designing and curating the front pages of the site. So sure, the Windows Media player integration and the DRM suck, it will never work on a Mac, but the actual service has some cool tunes and well-assembled playlists and features. They live up to “Get music from people who get music” in their tagline. Cool!

If only I could tell other people about it.

Not only am I unable to copy any text from the URGE artist blurbs and blog posts (is that a version of text DRM?), any “Share” buttons you may find simply generate links where your friends will be directed to download the URGE software. Sure, once they do, they will see what you sent them, but ‘cmon.

This “war on sharing” runs deeper. I happened to stumble into an awesome mix by Digitalism, which appears to be an URGE exclusive. I wanted to share it with a few of my friends, but found that it was entirely impossible to buy, download or share it. I resorted to just describing it over IM and sending a screenshot of the playlist (!) to another friend.

Here’s what it looks like:

I can’t link to the place where you could find this on URGE. Ha!

Check out Hype Machine, Last.fm and Amazon for Digitalism – you will have better luck there.

The Hype Machine’s radio page features a photo of Bruce whenever we can’t find any artwork or relevant images to display next to a track. It looks like this:

The photo is there with permission from Jovino.

Today, Bruce is doubly famous by appearing on I Can Has Cheezburger. The challenge is serious: